Keynote Speakers
Dr. Jessica Coon
McGill University
Jessica Coon is Associate Professor of Linguistics at McGill University and holds a Canada Research Chair in Syntax and Indigenous Languages. She had published on a number of topics in syntactic theory, including ergativity and split ergativity, verb-initial word order, agreement, and extraction asymmetries, with a special focus on languages of the Mayan family. In addition to theoretical work, she is involved in collaborative language documentation and revitalization projects with Indigenous communities in Canada and Latin America.
Dr. Hannah Sande
Georgetown University
Hannah Sande carries out both documentary and theoretical linguistic research. Her theoretical work investigates the interaction of phonology with morphology and syntax, with original data primarily from African languages. She has spent many summers in West Africa working with speakers of Guébie, an otherwise undocumented Kru language spoken in Côte d'Ivoire. She also works locally with speakers of Amharic (Ethiosemitic), Dafing (Mande), Nobiin (Nilotic), and Nouchi (contact language, Côte d'Ivoire). Her dissertation work focused on phonological processes and their interaction with morphosyntax, based on data from Guébie, where much of the morphology is non-affixal but rather involves root-internal changes like tone shift or vowel alternations. She continues to investigate morphologically specific phonological alternations across African and other languages.